1. Field
The disclosure relates generally to failure recovery in a virtual environment and more specifically to generating a parallelized, prioritized restart plan in the event of a failure occurring in the virtual environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
To achieve high availability in a virtual environment, virtual machines are pooled into clusters and the host environments the virtual machine clusters reside on are monitored for failure. In the event of a failure, the virtual machines on a failed host environment are restarted on an alternate host environment. If a virtual machine fails on a host environment that is functioning properly, then that failed virtual machine is reset on that same host environment.
The order in which virtual machines are restarted is determined by a virtual machine restart priority, which determines the relative order in which virtual machines are restarted after a host environment failure. Virtual machines are restarted sequentially on new host environments, with the highest priority virtual machines being restarted first and then continuing to those virtual machines with lower priority until all virtual machines are restarted or no more host environment resources are available. If the capacity needed to restart the failed virtual machines exceeds available capacity in the new host environment, it can happen that the virtual machines with lower priority will not be restarted. Virtual machines are restarted on a failover host environment, if one is specified.